THE LOSS OF A CHILD

Fr Jim Cogley

Fortunately, child loss in a family has become increasingly rare due to advances in medical science. However, it was all too common in the near distant past and many will recognize it as being part of their family story. Needless to say, it is an extremely painful issue where the natural order is reversed. Parents expect their children to bury them and not the other way round. Children are the promise of the future and a child’s loss is extremely difficult to live through. It is so difficult as to shatter fundamental convictions as to the universe being kind and just and many relationships begin to unravel after such a loss. This can be because partners may grieve in very different ways. In one case a mother looked to religion as an escape and became almost fanatical. Her husband took to the drink and buried his sorrows. A few years later they parted company with both still stranded in grief.

The manner in which parents come to terms with the death of a child will determine how the legacy of loss will affect surviving members. One man was remarkably unscathed

after four siblings dying before him. He remarked how his parents were always close and very supportive of each other and had grieved their losses before he came along. Their grief was resolved and not left for him to carry. The more trapped parents are in their grief and are unable to let go their child the more deformed will be their relationship with their other children. This will be even worse if that child is alive but was a secret and given up for adoption, others will unconsciously sense a missing member among the living. In the past a cruel piece of advice given to grieving mothers was to quickly have another baby in order to heal their pain. Another baby could never be the one that had been lost.

Often the death of a child elicits guilt in the parents, and this is felt as a heavy burden in the entire family system. The childs’ death is never spoken about and becomes a taboo subject. It is the next child who then becomes a living memento of the loss. This engenders an impossible role where on one hand they are expected to heal the wounds of loss but by their very presence can only serve to keep them open. They become the living mirror of the lost one where everything they do brings that child to mind. Since that loss is not spoken about, the hidden grief manifests as anger with the surviving child becoming the target. He or she might find himself being criticized, maltreated and unloved. They can’t do anything right, and this becomes internalized as self-criticism and self-rejection. Needless to say, this will have a detrimental effect on all his or her future relationships.

It is not unusual for a child born after the death of a sibling or several siblings to suffer the ambivalence of knowing that he or she was much wanted and yet be carrying a sense of rejection and not feeling close or bonded to either parent. This is very difficult for that child to fathom and makes sense only against the backdrop of understanding the depth of the parents’ loss. Having bonded deeply with the previous child, even from the womb and for that short life span, the wound is still so raw as to not permit anyone to come as close again in case they too might die and elicit such excruciating pain. This tragically deprives the surviving child of their chance of relationship with its parents and may well give rise to a very destructive lifestyle later as an adult.

Another all-too-common scenario is where the loss of a child leaves parents so insecure and anxious that they overprotect a remaining or subsequent sibling. Always play safe and never take risks becomes a life script. The latter will already have marinated in the grief and anxiety of the mother in the womb and will be vulnerable to over protection. Even before birth they will be burdened with a grief older than themselves. Strict constraint and excessive concern all based on fear becomes their lot. They are likely not just to be mothered but smothered where the natural process of separation in order to find their own identity becomes stymied. In fact, self-identity becomes a huge issue for the subsequent child since there is such an overlap between them and the one who went before. Such a life can be characterized by a sense of sadness and separation anxiety.

A story brought to my attention recently was of a child who died a cot death. His mother was so deranged with grief that she took the elder child who had just started school home again and put him back in the pram. He later grew up to be an adult who had an inordinate fear of death. As she was dying from cancer in her fifties a woman was asked how she felt about being named after her sister who died the same month that this lady was conceived. She immediately became fully alert and with deep hurt in her voice said, ‘I felt it was a terrible injustice,’ So it had been, because until then she had lived a miserable life, never sure of her own identity. Cutting the ties, even at that late hour, enabled her to quickly gain full recovery and live contentedly for another twenty-three years.